One episode into Amazon Prime’s My Lady Jane, I was already slotting the show into a little group of historical entertainments I privately call the Sassy Queens: Reign, a deliciously soapy CW show about Mary, Queen of Scots; The Great, an inventive Hulu series about Catherine the Great; Dickinson, Apple TV+’s influential, slant-told look at the life of Emily, the poet and my honorary American ruler. I loved The Great and Dickinson when they came out, but I now feel weary of historical television that seems to be built as if the showrunners worry that we would stop watching if we got bored for even a second. You have pop music, the sudden and jarring use of profanity and contemporary humor, a heroine who is both anachronistically audacious and way too girlboss-y. This bag of tricks is starting to feel familiar, and not a little bit grating.
My Lady Jane’s case was not helped when I discovered that it is an adaptation of a young adult novel that’s part of a series called The Lady Janies. (The heroines of the other five books include Jane Eyre, Calamity Jane, and a string of Marys: Mary Shelley, the pirate Mary Read, and the Queen of Scots.) My Lady Jane’s heroine, Lady Jane Grey (or the “Nine Days’ Queen”), was, historically, an educated Protestant woman who was crowned the queen of England in the summer of 1553, after the dying teenage King Edward VI, son of the famous Henry VIII, tapped her for succession in his will. Grey fell on the wrong side of chaotic court politics, and she was quickly deposed, then executed the following year. But in My Lady Jane, both book and show, this is not the case. Jane (played by Emily Bader) survives, and the entire historical storyline is further confounded by the fact that in this universe, some people—an oppressed minority, called Ethians—can change into animals.
“TF IS GOING ON” asked a fan on X, attaching a clip of the first time one of the show’s main characters turns into a horse on-screen. This was my response to the idea as well—at first. How painfully, tiredly YA, to build a universe around such a cardboard, constructed difference and use that difference—as if nobody had ever thought of this before—as a “metaphor” for actual prejudice! How boring, to see this as a stand-in for the actual, admittedly much less cinematic historical conflict between Catholics and Protestants! Like the confused people on the subreddit r/TudorHistory, I wondered if I were even supposed to be thinking about actual history at all, in parsing My Lady Jane, or if this show had nothing at all to do with real life.
But as I watched a bit more, my doubts flew away from me, like the flock of CGI birds the show uses to depict the Ethians in the process of changing. All those other sassy queen shows, not to mention the sexy-frothy historical-ish romance adaptations like Bridgerton and The Buccaneers that share some DNA with them, don’t do one thing as well as Jane does: roll around in the details of history that are funny, weird, scary, and gross. Consuming My Lady Jane flashed me back to being with other history graduate students, lost in the sauce, trading quips about the affordances of blunderbusses or the details of long-forgotten steamboat accidents. (Finding people who want to talk like this with you is a highly underrated benefit of going to grad school.) My Lady Jane is popular—it’s currently thriving on the Amazon Prime charts—either because of or despite the fact that it scans as if it was written by this exact kind of absolute dweeb.
The omniscient narrator of My Lady Jane, voiced by Oliver Chris, keeps us at an efficient arm’s length from what goes on in the world, acting as a translator to explain what the characters are doing on-screen. The weird stuff Tudor-era English people ate, and the weirder stuff they did to treat ailments, is a running joke throughout the story. “I scored a snaffle!” rejoices Jane while playing a bowling game. “What’s a snaffle, you query?” the narrator asks. “When it comes to Tudor sports, don’t overthink it. These people drink wine for breakfast.” The court physician rubs dung on Jane’s neck to treat a bruise; people happily eat boiled ostrich and roasted dolphin and spotted dick. “That’s Castilian inbreeding for you,” the narrator snarks about an unfortunate royal.
In one inspired move, as revenge and punishment, the princess Mary (Kate O’Flynn), who battles with Jane for the crown, makes an enemy be her Groom of the Stool—a real position, historically speaking, for an attendant who would assess the quality of a monarch’s bowel movements and (I’m sorry!) wipe their butt. Mary’s bloodthirstiness and sadism is an ongoing bit. When she finally gets Jane in prison, Mary’s counselor announces Jane’s punishment in court: “Her body should be laid out rotting on the ground and her interior organs should be brought out through the stomach and her body should be divided in four quarters and the head and the quarters should be placed where the queen wishes them to be assigned.” Mary smiles and gestures and urges him on as he pronounces the words she has excitedly drafted.
There’s another funny running bit in which Edward (Jordan Peters)—who, like Jane, gets to avoid death in this telling of the story—is just a flat-out, intractable sexist. He’s a good guy who loves his intelligent, capable cousin and respects her, but when he’s directly asked to help her defy custom and her role, he responds as if the answer is obvious. Can Jane avoid the arranged marriage that she’s in for by begging her cousin to help her out of it? Absolutely not! Edward explains to her with utmost condescension that she is a noblewoman and must marry. The gap between his kind personality and his ironclad allegiance to the Way Things Are plays expertly on our expectations for what our intrepid heroine will be able to change in her world. And it makes things funny.
Anyone who watches My Lady Jane hoping for a traditional meal of historical fiction will be confused. Some on r/TudorHistory counseled others to temper their expectations and see this one as “historical fantasy”—about as true to Lady Jane Grey’s life as Game of Thrones was to the War of the Roses. But what this show does goes beyond George R.R. Martin’s brand of expert extrapolation and into loving parody. It’s a show that holds history away from itself and giggles.